This week we learned, via the Intercept, of Erik Prince’s proposal to provide the Trump Administration with a private intelligence outfit. According to the Intercept, “The Trump Administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies.” The Intercept’s sources indicate that “the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering ‘deep state’ enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.”

It is far from clear whether Prince’s proposal has any traction. CNN, for instance, quotes Administration officials as saying “the White House does not and would not support such a proposal. Still, given Prince’s cloutandresourcefulness, reports of other proposals recommending privatized intelligence operations, and the need to maintain healthy skepticism when it comes to representations made by this Administration, we ought not be hasty in looking past the proposal.

However imprudent private military and intelligence operations have heretofore been, we should be clear on one thing: the private firms were supposed to reinforce or at the very least complement the efforts undertaken by members of the armed forces and intelligence agencies. (In fairness, this seemed to be what Prince was proposing when he met with White House officials this summer.)

What’s more, when and where military and intelligence contractors weren’t deployed simply as “force multipliers,” they were chosen because they were less legally encumbered than their government counterparts to carry out certain tasks. As I have argued elsewhere, exploiting the differences in legal status between public and private actors is a deeply problematic reason for using contractors. Yet, being hired to circumvent federal statutes and regulations—which the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations viewed as unnecessarily or unduly hamstringing—is a far cry from being hired because the feds couldn’t be trusted. (If anything, the converse was true.)

3. By contrast, based on the reporting we’ve seen, Prince wants to contract out intelligence work because he doesn’t seem to trust the U.S. intelligence community. Thus, this privatization push isn’t about hiring contractors to leverage market efficiencies; it isn’t about using contractors to break free of the shackles of constitutional and statutory law; and, lastly, this isn’t even about employing contractors to avoid tedious internal debates with career officials about the prudence or legality of intelligence operations. It seems, instead, that Prince sees the need for a parallel intelligence service that takes orders from the President and CIA director and answers directly to them.

If that’s a fair reading of what’s being proposed, then we must consider the Prince plan to be profoundly different and far more alarming, particularly if his private intelligence service will be tasked with “countering”—perhaps undermining or discrediting—their (distrusted) government counterparts. All of this is to say that if the raison d’être of Prince’s intelligence team is indeed to neutralize federal officials who’ve shown no signs of disloyalty, that’s precisely the type of domestic counterintelligence work we can expect. And, as Rebecca Ingber puts it, it is the creation of a private, domestic counterintelligence squad, more than anything else, that draws us closer to an “actual ‘deep state.’”